Tag: Email Tools

Recently, I’ve told you that people using Outlook Express should be switching to newer email clients. That’s because Outlook Express is old, it’s no longer supported by Microsoft, and it’s never going to improve. I’ve also written about several good replacements for OE. You can use Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Incredimail or any one of several other free email clients.

Yesterday, I tried a new free email client named Postbox Express. The installation of Postbox is easy and it also allows you to import the old email, contacts and settings from Outlook Express. Here’s a look at the main interface of Postbox.

As you can see, it’s very similar to the layout of Outlook Express. However, there are a few features in Postbox that might convince you to abandon OE.

One of my favorite features is the ability to view conversation threads. Emails with the same subject line are grouped and sorted by date, so you can easily see the history of a conversation. This is the feature that Gmail made popular in online email services.

If that doesn’t impress you, maybe you’ll be more fond of the ability to almost instantly search your entire email collection. You can use words, phrases or special searches, as shown in the image below.

One final feature I’ll mention, is the ability to post content from your email to Facebook, Twitter or FriendFeed. If you’re a frequent user of social networks, this may be your favorite feature. To send text from an email, just highlight it in the email, then click the Postpull-down menu and choose where to send it.

Postbox Express let’s you view your Folders and open email in tabs so that you don’t have to close a message to do other stuff.

You can also extend the functionality of Postbox Express through Add-Ons, or install language packs, such as German, French, Spanish (Spain), English (British), Italian, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, and Swedish.

As you can see, Postbox Express has many more features than Outlook Express. It’s free but there is a paid version with even more cool features. For most home users, the free version is more than adequate.

That’s right, all you do is launch it, enter your email address, name and client.

Here’s what it looks like.

Outlook AutoConfig will look up the email provider in it’s database and automatically configure your email client to use the correct settings. If it doesn’t work on your provider, you can contact the author to have your provider added to the database.

The next time you launch your email, you will be prompted to enter the password for the account.

Manually adding accounts to an email client is one of the toughest tasks involved with email setup. Outlook AutoConfig can make it painless. Since it’s a stand-alone program, no installation is needed and it’s simple to use. I highly recommend it.

Yesterday, I told you why you should upgrade Outlook Express to Windows Live Mail. My main concern is that Outlook Express is old, and that it’s no longer supported by Microsoft. People will continue to have problems with OE, and it’s never going to improve. Almost any new email client would be better right now. So, if you don’t like Windows Live Mail, or Mozilla Thunderbird, you might like Incredimail.

What’s so great about Incredimail?

Many people might tell you that Incredimail was designed for teen-aged girls. However, it’s flexible and even the more conservative email users can enjoy it. Once you look past the eye-candy filled interface, you might agree.

Here’s what the website says about this free email client:

Send beautiful email backgrounds

Add 1000’s of fun emoticons to your emails

Enjoy animated email notifiers

See exciting 3D effects in your emails

Add funny animations to your emails

Add cool sounds to your email messages

Install and Setup

Once you’ve downloaded Incredimail and start the install, there’s one screen that I’ll warn you about. As you can see below, Incredimail offers to change your default search engine and install a search toolbar. I haven’t found anything bad about these additions, and it’s up to you if you want them. You can remove them by clicking the Custom Installationbutton, and unchecking the filled check-boxes.

Setting up your existing email accounts is easy. If you are already using Outlook Express, You can import your correct email account configuration. When I installed it, this happened automatically and Incredimail was ready to use immediately.

Here’s a quick preview of what the Incredimail client looks like while it’s running.

There are tons of ways to customize the emails that you send. Here’s one I sent to my wife.

Gmail is one of the best webmail solutions available today, and it has been adding tons of features through Gmail Labs and other means. However, one of the most wanted thing missing in Gmail was Rich Text or HTML Signatures which would allowed users to add HTML text or images to their email signatures.

If you have been missing that feature, here is something to cheer about. Gmail has officially announced that users will be able to add Rich Text/HTML Signatures to their outgoing messages. To change your Gmail signature to use Rich Text, just visit the settings page and scroll down till you see the Signature option.

You can use the Rich text editor to insert images, hyperlinks, quotes and also format it to your liking. Once you have set your new signature just save your settings and the signature will be appended to your outgoing emails. You can also set different signatures for different accounts you have set up with Gmail.

Aircel India has taken a huge gamble by introducing a new device called "Peek" which is a Qwerty device similar to those provided by RIM’s Blackberry.

The device which is targeted at email users, has a Qwerty keyboard and is specifically for emails. Aircel boasts that Peek is the thinnest email device ever created. Peek in itself is not a pricey device, and at Rs. 2,999 it is almost a steal, but would Indian consumers really buy a device just for emails?

Consider this, most of the smartphones available today have email capability along with video, camera, voice and more, so would users buy a device just for the sake of email?

The marketing strategy of Aircel may not be wrong, but they are basically targeting a small niche of users who want dedicated devices to check their email and not the entire package which a smartphone offers. Whether a device with only email capabilities succeeds or not is a feat we will be watching.

Specifications: Aircel Peek is available in the two colors, black and red and comes with a Qwerty keyboard. Users can currently configure only 3 email accounts, which makes no sense to me and will have PUSH email capability.

Battery life is supposedly 2-3 days, but expect it to be much lower if you are a heavy email user. To top it you can only store up-to 5000 email message right now and about 1000 contacts.

Charges: Users will have to pay an initial amount of Rs. 897 for email access for 90 days and then have to shell out a monthly charge of Rs. 299 every month to download their emails.

Verdict: This device will definitely not take off as much as Aircel expects, considering that it restricts users to only 3 email accounts and also has a charge of Rs. 299 per month which is almost equivalent to a GPRS connection price one pays on mobile smartphones. In addition to that, this device is practically useless without a Internet connection and does not even allow you to make phone calls. All in all, my prediction is that, this device will be a big failure.

If you are interested in the Aircel Peek, you can find more information and purchasing details at the Official Aircel site.

Thunderbird 3 left a lot to be desired, and many users who used it had lots of bad things to say about it. Many did say that Thunderbird 3 was probably a rushed project by Mozilla, however, the past is past and Mozilla has already begun to fix the problems in the new version, Thunderbird 3.1.

Mozilla has released a new beta for Thunderbird 3.1, codenamed Lanikai Beta 1, which fixes around 100 bugs and improves performance for the email client.

Some of the major fixes includes:

Fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2

Fixes for auto complete, tabs and activity manager

Design improvements and corrections to the interface

Stability and memory improvements

You can view a list of the full list of bugs that were fixed here. Lanikai Beta 1 has also dropped support for Windows 95, 98, ME and NT and Mac OS X versions prior to 10.4 Tiger. You can find more information about the changes in the Thunderbird 3.1 Beta 1 release here.

Thunderbird 3.1 Beta 1 is available as a download for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can find and download the appropriate version for your OS from here.